I have been asked by the Catholic Bishops' Conference, as a member of their Committee on Europe, to represent them on the Special Observer Pillar of the National Forum. They wish to express their appreciation of the invitation to be represented, and warmly welcome the Forum as an exercise in participatory democracy which holds out the prospect of a better-informed and more involved public opinion. What I have to say is, therefore, a personal account of what I consider the attitude of the Bishops to be on the subject of enlargement. The Bishops would have no wish to take sides in strictly political matters, except where they appear to them to impinge on basic Christian values. The views expressed here are advanced in the context of a pluralist world. They represent simply, in the French phrase, a prise de position. Today's meeting is devoted to perspectives on the enlargement of the European Union. The Bishops support this enlargement as part of the process of achieving the European ideal, the basic principles of which, as expressed in the statutes of the Council of Europe, share common ground with many preoccupations of Catholic Christianity. Pope John Paul II expressed some of this common ground in his address to the Parliamentary Assembly on 8 October 1988, when he spoke of "peace founded on justice", "the preservation of civilization and human society" and support for "the spiritual and moral values which form the common inheritance of our peoples". He described that inheritance as "a long, shared memory", and summed up the ideal in a phrase of one of the founding fathers of Europe, Robert Schuman: "To serve mankind, freed at last from hate and fear and, after long years of division, rediscovering Christian brotherhood". As a consequence, the process and extent of enlargement need to be guided by that "long, shared memory" and by that same respect for "the spiritual and moral values which form the common inheritance of our peoples". This would imply, not merely a sentimental backward look into history, but a genuine and vigorous development of these values: values which have been painfully debated and worked out over centuries, and which are often the fruit either of Christian inspiration or of the dialectic of reconciling the original Christian insights with maturing human aspirations and the increasingly complex organisation of civil society. The kind of fundamental concept which comes to mind would be, for example, the universality of the Christian message which privileges no nation or ethnic group but is addressed to all human beings, making all equal and excluding none from full participation in the Christian community. In the context of arranging European affairs, this creates an aversion towards making the purely national an absolute value, while simultaneously emphasising the inherent worth of each individual culture. Furthermore, the same Christian message implies a specific concept of the world and of humanity. It implies the idea of the world as the work of a Creator and as His gift to mankind as the sphere of their activity and achievement. It implies the idea of the human being as a person, possessed of an individual and not merely a collective existence, capable of self-awareness and therefore of the exercise of freedom in responsibility, of the moral organisation of human affairs. In the face of the travail and frequent pain of the human condition, these are powerful factors for hope and optimism, and nerve us to bend ourselves to the challenge of the contemporary world. When this is linked with the conviction of human equality, it commits us to desiring and working for human solidarity, for social justice for all, whether it be workers, or the marginalised, or the exploited peoples of the world. It commits us to the liberation of the underprivileged and to campaigning for the civil and international peace necessary thereto. A final example of the same fundamental attitude is the acceptance of working in a pluralist context. This principle of the equality of private convictions before the public law we would hold to stem from the age-old effort to reconcile the insights of Christian faith with the demands of the organisation of civil society. In spite of the legacy of past struggles, the root of the demarcation between Church and State is the Christian distinction, as old as the Roman martyrs, between the autonomy of the individual conscience and obedience to the laws of civil society. It requires mutual respect between the community of believers founded on faith and secular society founded on public law. This in turn implies the possibility of co-existence for differing systems of conviction. It is of interest to note in this context that the map of those countries where the pluralist principle is put into practice is largely coterminous with those which have in their history been impregnated with Christianity. The concept, in fact, appears to be a distinctively European or Western one, and of primary importance in the democratic system. As such it was firmly espoused by Pope John Paul II in that same discourse of 1988 to the European Parliament. If this reference to philosophical principles or spiritual values seems visionary or far removed from the practical matters in hand, it should be remembered that the process of making Europe may be long and difficult, that the resolution of the problems created by enlargement may involve the negotiation of intractable issues, requiring economic sacrifice and political heart-searching. At such trying moments, the motive force of an over-arching vision and of philosophical conviction can become a decisive factor in accepting what otherwise might appear to be an unwarranted dilution of hard-won sovereignty. Turning then to the practical issue before this session, our attitude, as has been said, is to welcome enlargement in principle and on the basis of "shared values". At the last session of the Forum, the delegate from the Czech Republic, Mr. Skalic'ky, used a striking phrase: he spoke of the creation of a "Euro-Atlantic society". It was a timely reminder to us that this Europe of ours is at once an idea and, geographically speaking, a peninsula protruding from the great Eurasian land-mass. In both senses, enlargement, which is a process, must find and establish its own limits. The Bishops would naturally share the popular concern on such issues as sovereignty, neutrality and militarisation, on a Charter of Rights, on the democratic deficit and popular alienation. These topics will undoubtedly be addressed at future sessions which will, we may hope, lay to rest certain bogeymen, if such they are, like the vast Brussels bureaucracy, or the European Union as an authoritarian and elitist system dedicated to wiping out national or individual preferences. If the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity are correctly understood, and vigorously defended and put into practice, many dangers of the latter kind should disappear. In that connection and in conclusion, it is to be hoped that the effort involved in building the new Europe will produce here a well-informed public opinion and a self-reliant, self-confident people. We have our own specific share in the "long, shared memory" of Europe, and our resultant sensibilities might be brought to bear on partners in the Union who lack the benefit of such experience. As a final word, may we express our confidence in and our gratitude to all those civil servants, diplomats, ministers and public representatives who have defended Irish interests in Europe down the decades. We must thank them (and, may I add, Almighty God) for enabling us to share in a long period of prosperity and relative peace, almost unprecedented in European history. ENDS 19 November 2001 |